THE news that the council is likely to pick up the Swindon Skips tab will be greeted with the very opposite of shock.

Indeed, as revelations go, it is roughly on a par with the sun being hot or ice being cold.

Obviously, when it is said that the council will pay, what is meant is: “Once again, the long-suffering council tax payers will suffer through no fault of their own.”

The obvious question now is that of how this appalling situation came to develop on a site for which the local authority knew it was ultimately responsible.

How is it that an estimated 11 million kilos of festering garbage came to be stored there, seemingly without anybody in authority having raised so much as a murmur of unease?

Over the last few years the council has inflicted gross cuts, often on particularly vulnerable service users, and assured us that saving money was vital.

Many of those so-called savings will almost certainly be wiped out by the impact of the Averies fiasco.

In an ideal world, an inquiry would be held to root out anybody whose ineptitude contributed to the disgraceful situation.

Sadly, experience of similar inquiries in the past has taught us that nobody is ever brought to book.

We are instead treated to meaningless platitudes about lessons being learned.

The only things of which we can be certain are that not a single official or councillor will be censured, and that ordinary people will continue to suffer.